Expanded maternity and child care benefits are expected to be a pillar of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. These policies seek to make it easier for women to balance the challenges of being a working mother. While they may well be well-intentioned, but they backfire. The New York Times highlighted the downside.

First, the article focused on maternal leave policies in Spain:

Spain passed a law in 1999 giving workers with children younger than 7 the right to ask for reduced hours without fear of being laid off. Those who took advantage of it were nearly all women.

Over the next decade, companies were 6 percent less likely to hire women of childbearing age compared with men, 37 percent less likely to promote them and 45 percent more likely to dismiss them, according to a study led by Daniel Fernández-Kranz, an economist at IE Business School in Madrid. The probability of women of childbearing age not being employed climbed 20 percent. Another result: Women were more likely to be in less stable, short-term contract jobs, which are not required to provide such benefits.

The results in Chile were similar:

The child-care law in Chile, the most recent version of which went into effect in 2009, was intended to increase the percentage of women who work, which is below 50 percent, among the lowest rates in Latin America. It requires that companies with 20 or more female workers provide and pay for child care for women with children under 2, in a location nearby where the women can go to feed them.

It eases the transition back to work and helps children’s development, said María F. Prada, an economist at the Inter-American Development Bank and lead author of a new study on the effects of the law. But it has also led to a decline in women’s starting salaries of between 9 percent and 20 percent. Researchers compared pay at the same companies before and after they were big enough to be forced to comply with the law. (Another approach by companies, especially smaller ones, has been simply not to comply with the law.)

A broader analysis of 22 countries found that women were more likely to work when these types of policies are in place, but their jobs more likely to be “dead-end” positions and less likely to be managerial posts.

Even the Family Medical Leave Act, which provides up to 12 weeks of unpaid medical leave here in the United States, has hurt female job prospects. Women are slightly more likely to stay employed, but receive fewer promotions because of the law, according to research cited by the New York Times.

Balancing the challenges of working while raising children is difficult, but having the government force employers to provide additional maternal and childcare benefit is the wrong approach. Such policies harm job prospects for women and make the work-life balance even tougher to achieve.